vulgarize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make vulgar or coarse; lower; debase.
to vulgarize standards of behavior.
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to make (a technical or abstruse work) easier to understand and more widely known; popularize.
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to translate (a work) from a classical language into the vernacular.
verb
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to make commonplace or vulgar; debase
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to make (something little known or difficult to understand) widely known or popular among the public; popularize
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Etymology
Origin of vulgarize
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
In “Children of Light,” his Hollywood novel, he wrote: “There are people at this table who could vulgarize pure light.”
From New York Times • Mar. 9, 2020
James Ellroy served as one of two grand masters for the awards, saying, "We are here to vulgarize literature."
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 30, 2015
To vulgarize the dead is bad enough, but Pickwick does something worse�it anesthetizes the living.
From Time Magazine Archive
Solzhenitsyn's world is one of almost private Russian concern and grief, which no Westerner may lightly enter or vulgarize in glib anti-Communist terms.
From Time Magazine Archive
It is a sign of degeneracy in us to banter and to scoff, and cynically to vulgarize the ridicule and the contempt heaped upon us by others.
From Simon Eichelkatz; The Patriarch Two Stories of Jewish Life by Frank, Ulrich
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
